As an African/Nigerian I am not even allowed to see what it looks like. Talk less of trying to make a purchase [1].

Last Night, I had to lie that I am in the US so I would be allowed to by Remote by 37Signals on my kindle.

Quite ridiculous and annoying.

http://imgur.com/eS8agor

Everyone on HN acts like there's no possible reason for people to support these types of activities, but there could be very legitimate reasons these engineers choose to do what they do.

It could just be a challenge for them. Where else can you not only get away with, but be rewarded with a good salary and a pension for hacking into the most secure systems on earth? It must be thrilling to be 'Competing' against the best security engineers, best practices, with a massive budget to support your activities.

It could be that with their security clearances, they know things about threats that make their decision to work for the NSA a moral imperative. It's entirely possible that there are some really horrific classified things that were stopped via similar spying activities, so intercepting some Gmail messages seems like a much less evil alternative.

They could just be 'blindly' patriotic, have faith that the faults of the government are outweighed by the need to keep the US on top of the world.

There are many possible reasons.